Briefly Noted

Kudos, by Rachel Cusk (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In the final novel of a mordant trilogy, the narrator, Faye, a British writer, attends a literary festival in Europe. Her exchanges with complacent publishers, tedious journalists, and egotistical writers allow Cusk to eviscerate the characters for their ignorance—of themselves, of one another, and of the changing European political landscape post-Brexit. Literary-world foibles may be a tired subject, but the narrative brilliantly explores that very sense of fatigue, as illustrated in a speech delivered by Faye: “I said I wasn’t sure it mattered where people lived or how, since their individual nature would create its own circumstances: it was a risky kind of presumption, I said, to rewrite your own fate by changing its setting.”

Warlight, by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf). This shadowy novel intertwines the experiences of a fourteen-year-old, Nathaniel, with British intelligence operations after the Second World War. When Nathaniel’s parents move from London to Singapore, for the father’s job, he and his sister stay behind, in the care of a near-stranger who introduces them to a network of part-time crooks and other eccentrics. Gradually, Nathaniel realizes that his parents may not be in Singapore after all, and, following an attack on the siblings, their mother reappears. Where has she been, and where is her husband? What caused the scars that now cover her arms? These questions follow Nathaniel into adulthood as he scrutinizes the past, trying to comprehend the “true map” of his mother’s life, and his own.

A Girl Stands at the Door, by Rachel Devlin (Basic). In 1936, a black man named Lloyd Gaines was denied admission to the University of Missouri School of Law because of his race. The N.A.A.C.P. successfully sued, but Gaines disappeared mysteriously. From then on, the N.A.A.C.P.’s search for promising plaintiffs in desegregation suits focussed on female volunteers. Devlin tells the stories of young women who were adept at the “high-wire act” required to endure a long and perilous process. Ada Lois Sipuel, who desegregated the University of Oklahoma College of Law, was praised for her “finesse” and “ready smile.” Patricia Black, who testified in a lawsuit against a segregated Kansas school district, later said that she was chosen because she had been taught “how to act in certain situations.”

The Prodigal Tongue, by Lynne Murphy (Penguin Press). The story of how the British and American forms of English came to be seen as foes, despite their underlying friendship, is told here with wry humo(u)r and scholarly acumen. History plays a role: after 1776, “rejecting the King’s English was another way to reject the King.” But despite the efforts of reactionaries—some British philologists advocated a return to Old English—and of spelling modernizers like Noah Webster, the lexicon remains our common property. The author, a scholar of linguistics, revels in the minutiae of spelling, grammar, and usage, and her love of our living, changing language is infectious. When we communicate, she writes, “we’re not robots. We’re poets.”